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I hope you're just joking and didn't take my comments as a condemnation of not potty breaking a child early, especially the info from my Indian friend. It was just meant to point out the differences in cultures. Those differences haven't seemed to make a critical difference in our children, so we mothers need to cut ourselves some slack about potty training by a certain age. Like I told my daughter, how many kindergartners still wear diapers?

OGM Don't worry! I totally understood what you were saying. I have several anthropologist friends who work in very rural places where cloth is expensive and diapers non-existant. Our culture is different, more mobile, more parent child separation and most important, more carpets!

I was making a joke at my own expense. Really, I have never been an attentive parent. Whenever we were at a party and kids started crying or we heard one fall, I was usually the last mother the get up. Typically, if I was enjoying my conversation, I had completely forgetten that I even had a kid. It was only after everyone I was talking to ran to the kids room that I remembered I was even a parent and then I reluctantly got up to check on DS. It was sort of a running joke among my friends So when I was reminded of the more way other cultures parent, it just brought all those early years back. I knew even in Peru I probably would have been the mom who set her kid under a tree to play or pee while I planted corn and then forgot to pick him up at the end of the day. LOL!

Yes, I'd have been a lot more likely to train early if I had to wash out every poopy diaper by hand, or worse, wash my own poop-covered clothes because kids in my culture didn't even wear diapers. If you only had two or three outfits (as some cultures did/do), that could be a serious problem for you.

Disposables allow us a lot of freedom, and mean that we don't have to live and die by our kids' "signals." With the exception of my concern that diapers are filling the landfills and never decaying, I'm perfectly okay with the arrangement!

P.S. acs: I call my theory of parenting "benign neglect," so I'm totally with you there! No one would ever call me a helicopter parent, in spite of the homeschooling. Sooooo not my style!

hehehe... We have posts on our farm that were made from recycling plastics, diapers included!

You go, girl!

We used cloth diapers with child #1, but with all the washing and the use of the dryer in the winter, I was pretty well convinced that cloth really wasn't a much more "green" option.

Recycling the disposables sounds like the best of all possible worlds. (As long as I'm not the one doing the recycling. Ewww!)

Jumping in here randomly. i believe this is called Elimination Communication in our culture/society, not information that is need but i was interested in this idea for a while.

These potty stories are cracking me up. I've been trying something a little different with DDalmost3. When I need to go to the bathroom, I'll say to DD, "Oh... I need to go poo -- where do I need to go???" I look and act real concerned like the fact I need to poo caught me off guard and that I really need DD's help. She'll say, "In the potty!" "Thank you! That's right!" and I'll run to the bathroom. I'm trying to reinforce the fact that she KNOWS where to go and what to do to see if this helps matters when I re-introduce the underwear. She's changed her dialogue about pooping and going to the potty now, so maybe she's thinking about it differently.
It's hard to tell with DD. DH and I have recently decided that she's a lot smarter than we give her credit for, so we're not exactly sure what we're dealing with here. Of course, this just makes us more confused than we already are.

In regards to the gender bending cinderella underwear... DD LOVES the Lightning McQueen pull-ups way more than the girly princess ones. Makes me laugh.

I used to live nextdoor to some former missionaries.

They spent 5 years in Indonesia.

When they first moved in nextdoor, their DD1 was potty trained.

Where they worked in Irian Jaya the natives just held the kid out at arms length and let them do their thing.

By 3 mos their DD was trained just as well as a native kid.

Right before they came back, they trained her to use a toilet.

There is a movement here in the US called Elimination Communication - Natural Infant Hygiene. http://www.natural-wisdom.com

In a nutshell, parents choose to not use diapers at all. Instead they use bonding as the key to understand their baby's signs of when they need to go and hold them over a toilet when they need to relieve themselves.